Tucker Takes BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith To School On Dossier, ‘Partisanship Played A Role’ (VIDEO)

BuzzFeed’s Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith appeared on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Wednesday, to respond to a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, over Smith’s publishing of an infamous dossier.

“The dossier itself is a document of kind of obvious central public importance,” Smith said Wednesday. “That was clear a year ago. It’s actually a lot clearer now. Before we published it, as we knew then, important elected officials intelligence agencies were investigating this document.”

Carlson said Smith should have known better than to publish a document without fully verifying its contents.

“You see a lot of stuff that you don’t pass on, because you don’t know if it’s true. And the words hang in the air and you libel someone in effect, so you don’t run it,” Carlson said. “But you did run this, because it was Trump.” – READ MORE

BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday that declared he was “proud” of publishing the dossier exactly one year ago.

“Journalistic traditionalists didn’t like the idea of sharing an unfiltered, unverified document with the public, whatever the caveats and context,” he wrote, adding that NBC News’s Chuck Todd had called it “fake news” at the time.

“But a year of government inquiries and blockbuster journalism has made clear that the dossier is unquestionably real news,” he wrote.

He added that the dossier being “real news” is a “fact that has been tacitly acknowledged,” even though he did not call the dossier a fact itself.

“It has helped journalists explain to their audience the investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election,” he said. “The Russia investigation, meanwhile, didn’t turn out to be some minor side story but instead the central challenge to Mr. Trump’s presidency.” – READ MORE